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We now have the honor of working with famous comedian Andy Dick. We are proud to announce we will be unveiling a major cms platform for him within a month. Including such features like live episodes, tour dates and podcasts. Stick around to see more info.

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Originally written Feb 2010

I'm often asked which of the three major free CMS's are worth a clients time. Truth be told, it most likely depends on their ultimate goal with the site. Wordpress currently is the most popular, but that doesn't mean it's the best nor the right choice for your website. Over the last few years all 3 CMS's have gained a lot of popularity.

As you can see, Drupal is the furthest behind while WP leads the way. This most likely is attributed to ease and usability rather than "which CMS fits the project best". If a developer knows how to do one over the other, the options are irrelevant and they will continue to push the (often incorrect) CMS onto clients. We will go over 8 aspects for each CMS (Ease/Usability, Community, Features, SEO, Scalability, Best Attribute, Worst Attribute) and hopefully make your next CMS choice an easy one.

Drupal

The little water drop that could! This CMS was developed by the infamous Dries Buytaert. Dries still to this day continues to play a major role in it's development, continually working with developers at conferences (DrupalCon) and other functions while still allowing the community to ultimately control it's fate. He is also the founder of Acquia, a successful venture providing commercial Drupal support. In 2001, the original project was a message board that was released as open source and has grown nearly exponentially since it's inception. Drupal is the least popular of the three but in my opinion can become the most powerful and popular with some more novice friendly implementations, Drupal is like learning martial arts, it takes a long time to learn but once you, do you can kick a lot of ass.

Ease/Usability: Drupal is notorious for it's steep learning curve and unfortunately, this is true. It's pretty difficult for a first time developer to understand how to hook into modules or even to drop some code in the proper place. The reason for this is because Drupal is also the most dynamic and flexible. This is achieved through a more abstract model where all content (pages, forum posts, invoices) is essentially created the same way, but is then processed differently by name. This allows your code to benefit from a very robust core API and will perpetually allow others to do the same with your code (This model really strives to prevent repetition). The understanding of this context will of course make it more difficult to learn. You could never develop a massive social network in Wordpress, but you could in Drupal, quite easily. For advanced users, Drupal is the choice. It's simply the most powerful of the three.

Designers often struggle with Drupal as well, there are a lot of areas that are themeable and not necessarily easily realized. Also to design a Drupal site properly you will need to know the core of the theming layer pretty well (which most designers do not have the time, skillset or will to learn).

The back end for the user could be a lot better as well, it lacks a core WYSIWYG (without a 3rd party module) and often provides "too many options". Clients sometimes find it difficult to even understand what a node is. The word on the Drupal street is that Drupal 7 will be a lot more user friendly but we shall wait and see.

Community: Absolutely the best community out of all three. It is fantastic, the amount of modules is overwhelming. The community ports nearly every cutting edge item available and is pretty up to date. Anything from SIFR to Lightbox is easily installed with a module. You would be hard up to find a function or ability that is not acheived with a Drupal module (which is easily found and quick to install). The templates they offer are really nothing to write home about, but they are improving. The community is very willing to help you and that goes a long way. They also have a lot of pride, I was at DrupalCon DC and I can say the pride amongst the users beats any other CMS hands down. They are very optimistic that this will be the only CMS that matters in the near future. It's almost like a cult movie, where when you "get it" you can't stop expressing your love and enjoy showing others.

Features: Drupal offers it's users thousands of modules that can do almost anything you would ever want. It also offers multiple content types, not just pages but forms, profiles and news articles. Once you can grasp how to create content types and do basic features you have the ability to develop elaborate sites with communities and social features in hours, not weeks. It also allows users to edit content and features via the front and back end, which is nice for new users. It offers threaded comments and search features built in. Drupal also comes with a layered permissions system centered around roles assigned to users, fantastic for sites with complex workflows.

SEO: A lot of what's built in is much better for SEO than the others. SEO Friendly URLs are implemented in core and are executed almost without thought as you create nodes/pages. Lots of modules are available to increase your SEO (including SEO Checklist) with no experience at all. Tagging systems are within each node and keywords are generated based on content providing good SEO. Even someone without any experience will find themselves with better ranks when ported into Drupal.

Scalability: It's scalability is a major issue that will not be resolved in the near future, a decent site can make up to 300 requests to the database per page. This is weak, everything is "joined at the hip" which is the centralized database, no clear cut resolutions other than caching, which can go a long way as long as you are serving static pages. This solution falls short for social networks and dynamic sites that require users to log in and view dynamic content.

Best Attribute: The community.

Worst Attribute: (I bite my lip not to say their logo) Usability/learning curve.

Joomla

The "all together" CMS solution was started by MasterCheif (Andrew Eddie) upon leaving the Mambo development team and starting OpenSourceMatters, a site to inform users of updates. In 2005, after much input from the user base- the name, logo and initial core were complete and have been promoting ever since. It has achieved a lot of popularity with it's presentation and usability. It currently at 24 on the Alexa ratings and 2nd place in popularity amongst the free CMS options.

Ease/Usability: This is what pushes Joomla ahead of Drupal. It's usability/user friendly interface for newcomers is essential to it's success. It is quite simple to add and edit pages. Built in WYSIWYG, easily understood navigation systems and basic features keep a novice from blowing his brains out.

The design layer is about the same as Drupal, they both don't have a lot of amazing designers developing templates and new designers find it slightly overwhelming to develop for on initial attempts. This often leads to block-y designs with often clear cut columns and little creativity. Most Joomla sites look the same.

There have been some complaints such as how pages have to be linked to a menu system (regardless of visibility) which can cause confusion but as a whole they execute a user friendly experience (while staying in the client realm of things you'd like to do). Also if you wish to do such dynamic sites like social networks with advanced features that may not be ready for you, PHP developers are discouraged at how hard it is to simply add a php snippet, this is attributed to it's limited modular capabilities, where modules have a hard time getting the rigid core to play nice.

Community: A large community, I don't view it as loyal or die hard as the Drupal developers but I do see it's popularity. It's support site is in the top 500 sites on the internet and that says a lot. Although it's documentation has been criticized, finding answers from other users should not present difficulty. There is constant communication amongst it's uses on the forum.

Features: It has a lot of things you'd come to expect (such as User Management, Contact Management, Polls and Search Features) and even some you wouldn't expect (Media Manager, Advertising Systems and Language Managers). Almost all easily understood and easily to implement on your site. Unfortunately though it lacks basic things such as a built in commenting system (upgradable) and SEO items like clean URLS. Also sometimes the plug-ins do not install properly and some are not free.. (this bothers me when dealing with such open source platforms).

SEO: With a lack of clean URLS and almost horribly unique url syntax like Component and Option (i.e. www.yoursite.com/component/_weblinks/catid,6/Itemid,15/), a Joomla site is easily identified. It really does not show near the care for SEO as Drupal or even WP. Hopefully this will be resolved in coming versions.

Scalability: It's scalability is essentially the same as Drupal, poor. With lots of database queries bogging down each page request it's difficult to see it being scalable and fast.

Best Attribute: Usability for beginners.

Worst Attribute: Flexibility

Wordpress

Now with 200 million sites and counting, Wordpress has become the leader in CMS development, it's massive template community and ease of use propelled this platform into every developers resume. Created by Matt Mullenweg as a fork of b2/cafelog in 2003, it's now one of the premier open source platforms and is synonymous with user-friendly workflow and plug-in rich development. When a user needs a small website or blog (and want CMS capabilities) only one option will always be mentioned, Wordpress.

Ease/Usability: When dealing with small sites with blogging in mind, there is no better solution. Wordpress's simplicity allows a user friendly back end which makes it the perfect solution for small websites and bloggers everywhere. To install a stunning base template, is extremely simple. It's a main contributer to what I call "developer guilt", when something is so easy you get nervous. The issue with Wordpress is the moment you want to do something outside of the blogging world. It's as flexible as a rock. It's so far from Drupal's capabilities, its often referred to as "barely a CMS platform".

Community: Wordpress has a great community for development and the best community for theming (even after Wordpress banned "sponsored themes" which were viewed as spam by the community). Amazing designers are completely in-touch with Wordpress's popularity and have tapped it and donated tons of great templates. Well written documentation, plentiful plug-ins and excellent base templates leave little to complain about when dealing with the Wordpress community.

Features: Everything you'd expect to have with a blog is here or can be downloaded in a heartbeat. Anything related to blogging (tag clouds, commenting, search features, indexing and revision systems are all in place) and it shows. Even the most basic WP sites usually have neat features attached. With the inclusion of more Javascript in recent history, the sites are looking better and better and providing users with a really good experience without having to spend thousands. Unfortunately one negative thing is it's lack of security. The community is continually trying to fix exploits and holes in the system. They have gotten better but it's still the weakest of the three.

SEO: With a phenomenal tagging, indexing and clean URL system, it's SEO is top notch.

Scalability: It's not very scalable and does not handle a lot of hits in a short amount of time well (although better than Drupal). There have been numerous issues when hit with a lot of traffic at one time or "the digg effect". When dealing with dynamic content, it will surely have issues when under fire, the only solution seems to be to cache as much as possible and/or present static html under the attack.

Best Attribute: Design/Plug-In Community

Worst Attribute: Flexibility

Hopefully these comparisons and brief overviews will help you when your next CMS project arrives.
Plan and accurately decide with your client. Which one suits you best? Which one makes the most sense for you?

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I hope to bring this type of quality and incredible design to my clients one day....http://havenworks.com/

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I'm depressed. I'm depressed at how pathetic people are and how the will to believe in something "cool" often derails intellectual debate (even within one's own head). Lately we've been flooded with new cool music, tv programming and movies, often marketed as reality. Unfortunately nearly everything marketed as so, is not. In fact, it's usually not even based in reality. Viral campaigns almost exclusively survive on the concept of it being real, in the moment and making the viewer feel as if he/she "discovered something". So our current generations perception of reality is completely skewed.

Television: Oh, there are so many instances on television it's hard to pinpoint one network as being the worst but i'll try... MTV, remember when you were witty, sarcastic and creative? Remember when your programming was legendary and your name actually stood for Music Television (they have recently dropped the music television from their branding)? Now we're being fed this false reality of Jersey Shore, My Life As Liz and nearly almost every other program on the channel. Let me hit you with some fun info!

(Referring to the fake show My Life As Liz) - Of course MTV doesn't claim that's it real and why would they? Giving viewers the illusion that is in indeed real creates more "credibility"; in and entertainment in the viewers mind. MTV has claimed that all the shows are scripted to a point (except for the Real World Series and the True Life series).

Only two of the 50 reality shows are not scripted. What's more disturbing is not this fact, but how many people believe Liz is just a cute nerd who hates the popular girls at her school. Not only is the acting embarrassingly bad but the plots are completely predictable and reek of "old man perception of highschool". TV is not alone in it's false reality marketing... not by a long shot.

Movies: Fortunately movies are almost always assumed fake so a few have to push the concept further with poor filming and dialogue to really sell it! Usually in the Found Footage genre, there have been several sinners in fake reality movies starting with items like Cannibal Holocaust and more recently with Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity, The Poughkeepsie Tapes and Incident in Lake County. Almost all these films experienced minor success virally and we're planned to do so. These seemingly underground movies have even gone so far as to omit credits in it's attempt to deceive the viewer. Some good advice, if it's on your local big screen- a lot of people had to fund and produce this, it's not real.

Internet: Now the biggest sinner of them all, but also the hardest to detect. The internet has hundreds of REAL viral breakouts (mostly on youtube) but every now and then there are complete fakes. The latest is this:

At first glance it's the coolest thing ever! Ironic rap, "interweb" lingo, and Napoleon Dynamite-esque persona's (out of touch and in their own reality). I've been shown this video several times already from eager friends showing the newest fad. I usually don't take issue with these trends and usually even laugh with everyone, but fake/planned/marketed viral video is not fun for me. If you can't tell, this group is completely a farce...
The original group "Max Normal TV" was a hailed as the Ali G of South Africa and not only have his tattoos been proven fake but the production and major label kind of bring up the question, who's behind this? Also the director of the in the moment video you saw before happens to be a major director for the likes of Coca Cola and other major brands. It's all playing into the idea of fake reality, viral marketing and "you saw it first" mentality. Die Antwoord are currently in talks for a major tour (with major cash)- the plan worked! So congrats, the club will be packed with eager naive hipsters believing they are part of the joke while in reality the joker is laughing at them.

As ironic Next Gen reality star Flava Flav once said (in his original and meaningful group Public Enemy), "Don't believe the hype". Start questioning what you believe in (media wise)- Question who you give your money to. Question what makes up your identity. They know their lifespan is short when using a gimmick, but they will milk you for everything you got before you can put it in the guilty pleasure (out of embarrassment) section of your brain.

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Our team is very small. We like it that way, it allows us to have personal connections with our clients and ourselves. Antonio and myself have been developing together for about 4 years now and I've learned a lot from it. Before we met I was mostly a designer for bands and shirt companies. My web experience was only based in some small businesses. Then as I progressed into web and more advanced theming I learned a really important lesson, don't just make the design nice but make it useful and well thought out. Usability is sometimes much more important than a pretty design, but ofcourse the golden egg is having both. The client has a responsibility to provide all functionality and content before a designer even starts a draft to assure a well thought execution of his ideas. Here are some examples of usability and breath-taking design working hand in hand....

http://www.Giraffe.net/

This site is phenomenal, this is a great example of all the functionality being preserved (menus, twitter updates, photo gallery) and still executing a design that would blow people away. Not one link seems out of place or forced and believe me that is a skill in it's own right. You immediately know what this site is about upon one glance. Nothing is confusing about the design, it's well thought out and well executed.

Grooveshark.com

This site allows even the newest users feel like a pro. Every tool is not only easily accessible but almost intuitive. It's flash interface also provides a slick presentation while operation almost like a piece of software rather than a website. You find yourself set up in seconds and that's what can determine if a client/listener will ever return. This site could not ever look this good without the programmers and designers working hand in hand.

Both sites are extremely well thought out and not just from a designers point of view but both a designer and programmer. This brings me to the main point. Always have your content or programming functionality (every button, every slider, every function) in hand before developing, it's very difficult to build or theme something when you have no idea what content is going in or what functions are being provided. If you don't know the purpose or items of importance your design will surely suffer. Designers and programmers and clients need to bring everything to the table before development starts, it is the only proper way. This seems like it would be a duh situation but most clients start development before they even start thinking about content and a developer has no choice but to run with it. Elitist designer attitudes and hands off clients cannot create well done web work. It takes two to make it out of sight.

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Einstein once said "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." We are all inspired and shaped by our influences but knowing how to use it and knowing the line can define a great designer from a fraud.

Plagiarism, as defined in the 1995 Random House Compact Unabridged Dictionary, is the "use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work." but where does the line begin? Is a color scheme a rip off? Is a style or genre of site design a rip off? I don't believe so. I think there are certain items that are free use and can only be written off as inspirational. Color schemes, framing, trendy stylings (big headers, 3d menus, dropshadow or glows), and use of icons in web design are items that can really not be "ripped off". They are common traits among most designers, the key is to take certain ingredients from a lot of influences put them in your creative pot and create something unique and hopefully even better than what your original influences were. A good designer progresses past his influence, a poor designer matches it.

When a designer puts out a good product, just like a good piece of art - it should cause influence and slight imitation. That's how trends occur in design. No one should feel guilty by influence of greatness, it will make you a better designer. But there is a line, and that line is when you take several items from a specific site, including it's defining features. One of the best examples is the recent campaign of Dick Gordon, which has ripped off nearly all identifiable features of the Obama campaigns site.

They have lifted not only color scheme but layout, photography style, and nearly every feature of the page. This is unacceptable. This is passing on another's work as their own. There is nothing to be proud of Allan Palmos, this is ripping off and not just being influenced. The Obama design team created one of the most inspiring beautiful design campaigns ever and to steal something so well done and unique (not to mention known) is just poor work.

Another example of major companies stealing and not being inspired is ex-internet juggernaut AOL stealing from Yahoo. Yahoo spent lots of time and money into how it's homepage is laid out for efficiency and aesthetic appeal (in that order) and AOL went from being influenced by a layout or design to completely stealing everything about it, the format, the icon style, the position of the blocks, the search bar - EVERYTHING.

This can show you that not just low ball designers are susceptible to plagiarism, we all are. We should be concious of it and continue to promote progressive ideas and continue stirring the creative pot filled with pieces of influence.

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